One of the fundamental aspects of the American legal system, and indeed many others across the world, is the use of impartial fact finders to resolve legal disputes. Whether the fact finder takes the form of a judge or a jury, its function is to take in evidence regarding a particular legal dispute and to draw conclusions about what happened or didn't happen based on this evidence. In today's complex world, impartial fact finders regularly encounter maters about which they know little or nothing, matters involving the intricacies or limitations of science, medicine, economics, and technology, for example.
In these instances, fact finders typically rely on expert witnesses whose experience and/or training in a given field can be useful to teaching the fact finders enough to discern likely fact from likely fiction. In high-stake legal disputes it is common for both sides to have their own expert witness. Often, these legal disputes reduce to a duel of opposing expert witnesses, with each expert presenting an alternative evaluation or conclusion about some technical issue beyond the real-world knowledge of the fact finder. In these contests, the choice of expert witness often turns out to be a crucial factor in the successful resolution of the dispute for the prevailing side.
As such, lawyers spend considerable time, attention, and money not only evaluating and selecting expert witnesses to advocate the positions of their own clients, but also evaluating and critiquing expert witnesses advocating opposing positions.
One problem the present inventors recognized is the lack of efficient tools for helping lawyers evaluate expert witnesses. Conventionally, evaluation expert witnesses entails using online legal research systems, such as the Westlaw™ legal research system, to find judicial opinions that mention particular experts, study these opinions, and then draw conclusions about which experts may or may not be appropriate to support them in a new dispute. Typically, this process not only takes many hours of time-consuming analysis of cases and expert testimony, but is also fraught with the potential for errors, such as overlooking particular patterns or tendencies of a particular expert. Moreover, for comparing multiple experts the problems are only multiplied.
Accordingly, the present inventors identified a need for a better way of evaluating expert witnesses.